Full Satellite Coverage vs Exposed Home Continent

A recent play-though has led me to think it may be worth leaving the remaining countries in your home continent without satellites (excluding South America).

If you have 2 or more countries without satellites you continue to get Abduction missions. You still get your continent bonus but the extra cash, meld and rewards from Abduction missions are a decent boost to you mid game.

As you are only completing abduction missions in one continent the panic doesn't rise either.

That is assuming they don't replace normal UFO missions - does anyone know whether this is the case or not?

Edited: to state mid game rather than early game as rightly pointed out.

Solution 1:

Having played through 2 classic games now I'm pretty happy that this is a sound strategy.

You do get extra abduction missions and the extra cash & weapon fragments mid-game do help a lot. Also abduction missions tend to be some of the easier missions and so are good for levelling up your troops.

I have not yet tried this on Impossible.

Solution 2:

Cons:
Consider the very effective strategy of choosing a country on your home content for your fist satellite deployment. The primary focus of this strategy is to attack the alien base ASAP. Put more money into your ground forces instead of Satellites and Interceptors. Building and deploying a second satellite is not unheard of, and recommended, but I don't go beyond that until month 2 or 3.

This is especially useful for an Asia start b/c you are looking to build the Officer Training School and Foundry fast, and begin upgrades. This is the strategy I used to complete Ironman Impossible from an Asia start. 3 satellites can be deployed for monthly income before you must purchase an interceptor for another continent.

Europe start promotes early workshops, which promotes (among other bonuses) early satellites. This is a good start for satellite-coverage focused strategies, which lets you put-off deploying sats on other continents because catch-up will be easier with 2 workshops, again, delaying interceptor purchases, especially until N. America is covered

Also note that almost all successful strategies for Impossible difficulty focus on the early elimination of the Alien Base for panic reduction and cash instead of early satellites.

Pros:
Africa is a good candidate for 'exposed home continent' strategy for having only 2 more countries to cover and incentive to cover other continents fast. Plus income bonuses.

The only country I would find this strategy especially useful for for is N. America, for discounts in interceptor purchases, and only 2 countries to fight off abductions. in N. America starts, I almost always cover S. America immediately for the technology boost.

I have not tried transferring an existing interceptor from my home continent in the early game. This is probably the best thing to do for the Exposed Home Continent strategy.